While he’s working on getting humans into space, SpaceX CEO/CTO Elon Musk hasn’t forgotten the greats who propelled us out of the stratosphere through fiction long before him. Today, Musk tweeted that he’s named two of his spaceport drone ships in the most fitting way: after ships from science fiction writer Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.
SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ships are custom-built ocean platforms designed to accommodate the landing of booster rockets after they have sent spacecraft into orbit. The company is still in the testing phase, but decided to christen their first completed ship of its kind:
@elonmusk … In honor of IMB, RIP.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2015
Lest the other drone ships feel left out, Musk added:
West Coast droneship under construction will be named “Of Course I Still Love You”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 23, 2015
Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You are two of the sentient, planet-sized Culture starships which first appear in Banks’ The Player of Games. Just as the Minds inhabiting each Culture ship choose their names with care, you have to imagine that Musk did the same here.
Banks already lives on through an asteroid, but it’s heartening to see the reach of his work on our current forays into space.
Cover art from The Player of Games
And hope that the future world will look like the Culture: https://yannickrumpala.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/anarchy_in_a_world_of_machines/
Or see: Yannick Rumpala, “Artificial intelligences and political organization: an exploration based on the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks”, Technology in Society, Volume 34, Issue 1, 2012.
Every so often I’ll be reminded that he’s gone. And then I’m sad for a while, and I’m reminded of this quote from Surface Detail:
“So I’m dead?” she said, still not fully comprehending.
“Well,” Sensia said, “obviously not so dead so you can’t ask that question, but, technically, yes.”
The Culture ships are not “planet-sized.” They’re not even Moon-sized.
(The Culture does have a few Ringworlds, and Dyson Sheres, but they are extreme aberrations, and are not ships. The GSV class are described as cubes, a few kilometres per side.)
From Consider Phlebas: “Although it was only four kilometres in height, the Plate class General Systems Vehicle Little Rascal was fully fifty-three in length, and twenty-two across the beam. The topside rear park covered an area of four hundred square kilometres, and the craft’s overall length, from end-to-end of its outermost field, was a little over ninety kilometres. It was a ship-construction rather than accommodation biased, so there were only two hundred and fifty million people on it.” Later books, set ~1000 years later, have much bigger GSVs, 200 km in length with 4+ billion human population.
Favorite Culture ship name: Prosthetic Conscience.
Culture ship names appear in the first novel in the series, Consider Phlebas (The Player of Games is the second), but as far as I can determine from a very quick scan, not until the Dramatis Personae at the end of of the novel. First one I see mentioned is the Nervous Energy. Others include Irregular Apocalypse and Profit Margin. The prologue introduces a nameless ship with a mind but no crew, but much of the story takes place on the non-Culture pirate/mercenary vessel Clear Air Turbulence. Some other action takes place on the Idiran war vessel The Hand of God 137.
Culture ships tend to be metropolis- or even nation-sized, depending on their purpose. Enormous habitat ringworlds fabricated from asteroids and other collected raw material are known as Orbitals.
Those are both good names, but my favorite remains You Call This Clean?
There’s an account on twitter called @CultureShipName that tweets new ship names from the recent news (such as this following the Charlie Hebdo massacre: ROU: Yeah, The Pen’s Still Mightier).
When IMB announced his cancer they tweeted just one thing.
ROU: The Worst Possible News
(and now I’m tearing up again damnit)
Favourite name for an offensive unit, A Frank Exchange of Views.
Mars Colonial Transporter: BIG SEXY BEAST
Okay, that is some good news.